July
16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Being an American Jew, someone who lost
family in the Holocaust, and who has a lot
of beautiful loving family members in
Israel, the Holy Land is especially
important to me. As an academic
dermatologist, a scientist who routinely
questions dogma, I came to question our
common understanding of Israel/Palestine.

Dermatology gave me first-hand experiences
in countries across the Middle East. The
Muslim people I met in Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
and even Iran were all warm and friendly.
Those experiences gave me the courage to go
to Palestine and meet, firsthand, Israel’s
“enemy.” Like a good researcher, I had a
hypothesis to test, that Palestinians would
be nice people, just like everyone else.

Max
and Jane Carter, Quakers in Greensboro, take
a group to tour Israel/Palestine and
volunteer in Ramallah for about two weeks
each summer. This year I went along, and
what I found surprised me.

I was
not surprised by the treatment Palestinians
suffered under Israelis, but it was still
emotionally moving to be there, to see
apartheid happening. A former Israeli
soldier, proudly Jewish, took us to Hebron
and described how there are separate laws
for Jews (Israel civil law) and non-Jews
(military law). He pointed out that if an
Israeli throws a stone at Palestinians,
nothing is done; if a Palestinian responds
with a stone, he or she is sentenced to
years in prison.

He
described how Israeli settlers would harass
Palestinians, then complain to the military,
whose response would be to create “sterile”
zones where Palestinians would not be
allowed. Settlers would then enter those
zones, complain about the Palestinians near
them, and the zones would be expanded. For
the benefit of a few hundred Israeli
settlers, formerly vibrant parts of this
city of 200,000 Muslims have been turned
into a ghost town, hundreds of Palestinian
businesses closed, the doors of people’s
homes welded shut. The settlers would, quite
correctly, point out that what they are
doing is not nearly as bad as what was done
to Palestinian families in the founding of
Israel, when hundreds of thousand
Palestinian men, women and children were
expelled and made and kept refugees from
their homes, their homes and villages
destroyed.

What did surprise me was that Palestinians
were, by far, the nicest people I have met
anywhere. Entering Ramallah, home of the PLO
and Palestinian Authority, passing a sign
saying that it was dangerous for Israelis to
enter, we were warmly greeted by people
wherever we walked. It was a friendliness I
have not experienced anywhere else, not in
New York or Winston-Salem, not in any of the
many countries to which dermatology has
taken me. The warmth and friendliness of the
Palestinian people could only be described
as what you might expect people to be like
if they were, as Palestinians are, the
people who live in the land where Jesus once
walked.

Having gotten to break bread in the homes of
Palestinian Christian and Muslim families,
having met Palestinian workers, teachers,
children, religious leaders, refugees and
legislators, I am convinced that there could
be peace overnight and the security Jewish
people need if Israel would repatriate
Palestinian families, give everyone equality
and justice, and live together in peace
throughout the Holy Land.

People
who have not had the firsthand experience
that I have had may tell you, based on the
violence that they have seen, that
Palestinians must be violent people, but
they aren’t. Peaceful Palestinian people
suffer from far more violence meted out by
good Jewish Israeli people who are pained by
it but who believe -- quite wrongly -- that
the only way Jews can have security for
their children is via their oppression and
dispossession of non-Jewish Palestinian
families.

Our
group met with Rami Elhanan, a Jewish
Israeli, the son of a German Holocaust
survivor, a man whose beautiful 12-year-old
daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide
bomber. He understands like no one else can,
and he told us:

We
don’t want you to be pro-Israeli or
pro-Palestinian; we demand of you to be
pro-peace. To be against injustice and
against this ongoing situation in which one
people is dominating another. It must be
changed, it’s the essence of evil, and it
must be stopped…I am a Jew with the utmost
respect for my people, to my tradition, to
my history and my religion. And I will tell
you that ruling and oppressing and
humiliating and occupying millions and
millions of people for so many years without
any democratic rights is not Jewish, period,
no two ways about it, and being against it
is not anti-Semitism.

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